Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: Nicolas Sarkozy

May 23, the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany (P5+1) will enter into talks with the Iranian leadership about the latter’s nuclear program. The Baghdad talks come on the heels of talks last month in Istanbul. A number of observers have raised expectations for the talks in Baghdad. The latest hopeful development is IAEA chief Yukiya Amano’s declaration, on the heels of his visit to Tehran, that he expects a structured agreement for inspections to be signed “quite soon.” Any progress toward a diplomatic solution would be preferable to backsliding or a collapse. Unfortunately, the talks are unlikely to live up to the high expectations.

Beyond Amano’s visit to Tehran, the big change since last month’s talks is French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s loss to the socialist, François Hollande, who appears less truculent on Iran than was Sarkozy. Previously, Sarkozy was the hardest-driving member of the P5+1, so Hollande’s victory is likely to bring the P5+1 into closer harmony. More broadly, the considerable anxiety over the prospect of an outright collapse of the Euro is likely to diminish European interest in focusing too much attention overseas.

Despite these changes, however, one wonders how the underlying calculus of negotiations has changed. The United States is still threatening to bomb Iran in order to prevent it from developing a nuclear deterrent. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is continuing to define “success” in a way such that it cannot realistically be achieved, and warning that anything less than total Iranian capitulation is failure. Like-minded U.S. legislators, such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), agree that the only acceptable Iranian move is immediate surrender. And high-ranking Iranian military officials are declaring that Iran is “standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel.”

Given these two sets of developments, the question remains: Have sanctions by the United States and its partners caused enough pain and fear of instability in Iran that its leadership will forego a nuclear program that it likely feels is vital for its legitimacy and security? Most skeptics, this writer included, would like to be proved wrong, but they still appear to have the better of the argument.

Francois Hollande is a man on a mission—to increase the top rate of tax on income to 75 percent. The Socialist candidate, who is poised to beat Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election, said, “Above 1m euros [£847,000; $1.3m], the tax rate should be 75% because it’s not possible to have that level of income.”

Hollande’s “unassailable” logic aside, the measure would remind those who are too young to remember the 1970s of what happens when the rapacious state makes work really unprofitable. I can just see the Whitehall mandarins wring their hands with joy as thousands of French high-earners, from actors to businessmen, pour across the English Channel to London. If anything, the disastrous effect of the French tax will be greater than four decades ago—the world, after all, has become even more competitive and the cost of relocation has fallen appreciably. Karl Marx is supposed to have said that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Hollande may well prove him right.

Back in 2002-03, when France opposed going to war in Iraq, conservatives spared no venom for the country some called “Our Oldest Enemy.” In retrospect, though, France was a better friend to us then than she’s been in our ongoing Libyan debacle.

As the bombing began last month, the LA Times ran a piece showing that French bellicosity (yes) had been instrumental in dragging the US to war:

Earlier in the week, French papers reported that when Sarkozy asked [Secretary of State] Clinton to come out more forcefully in favor of action in Libya, she replied, “There are difficulties” and refused to be drawn out further.

“Frankly, we are completely puzzled,” a French diplomat told one of his European counterparts. “We are wondering if Libya is a priority for the United States.”

It shouldn’t be. Apparently it is now. And that, I argue in my Washington Examiner column this week, shows the dangers of NATO, a 60-year-old entangling alliance that long ago outlived its usefulness.

Credit or blame goes to French celebrity-philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, who, “in the space of roughly two weeks,” the New York Times reports, got “a fledgling Libyan opposition group a hearing from the president of France and the American secretary of state, a process that led both countries and NATO into waging war.”

Who is Bernard Henri-Levy (BHL)? He’s heir to an industrial fortune, and a crusading socialist who favors open-collared shirts, stylishly long locks and “humanitarian” wars. One critic summed up BHL’s persona tartly: “God is dead, but my hair is perfect.”

The financial crisis and global warming have reinforced an age-old criticism of our traditional ways of measuring wealth, and a number of alternative indexes have been proposed that would instead measure people’s well-being and environmental sustainability.

There are problems with using GDP. It involves an incredible amount of guesswork; and even if it were perfect, it would be bizarre to use production of goods and services as the only yardstick to evaluate our societies. But finding problems is one thing; it is something completely different to find an alternative that is better. Any sort of well-being index would require agreement on what well-being is, and there is a risk that governments would be tempted to find a one-size-fits-all standard and try to make us all wear it.

In a new paper I examine some of the proposed alternatives and they all beg the question about well-being by defining it as the result of the particular kinds of policies that they happen to prefer. Bhutan’s famous National Happiness Index, for example, defines it partly as a strong, traditional culture, and has used it to oppress minorities. And the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, created by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and led by economist Joseph Stiglitz, selectively chooses measures to show that France is richer in relation to the United States than it would otherwise be.

The advantage of GDP is precisely what it has often been criticized for – that it is a narrow and value-free measure. It does not even try to define well-being, and so fits liberal, pluralistic societies in which people have different interests, preferences and attitudes toward well-being. It tells us what we can do, but not what we should do; and since it measures what we can do, it also correlates with most of the things most people want from life: better health, longer lives, less poverty and even happiness. The latest research shows not only that people in rich countries are happier but also that countries grow happier as they become richer.

Read the paper here. Read Will Wilkinson’s Policy Analysis on happiness research here.

Every member of Sarkozy’s “club” has its stories of sick people who have been “dumped,” in one manner or another, despite laws that officially preclude such things from ever happening. In 2005, Canada’s Supreme Court wrote of its country’s Medicare system: “Access to a waiting list is not access to healthcare…[T]here is unchallenged evidence that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.” The British, meanwhile, often seem more content to let the National Health Service shortchange its patients than to let an American lecture them about how often it happens.

The checkered history of government guarantees is why so many Americans – a majority, in fact – oppose President Obama’s new law, which they believe will move the United States even further from Sarkozy’s ideal world than it is now.

Presidents Obama and Sarkozy may prefer the false compassion of a government guarantee. I’ll take the real thing.